Formation of leadership qualities in students

The following paper discusses the features of leadership in a student group. The author presents interpretations of leadership phenomenon that exist in domestic and foreign literature and analyzes the phenomenon of leadership differentiation role in a group. A phenomenon of leadership identification, as a mechanism of the leader influence on followers, is studied by the experimental method. As a result the author comes to the conclusion that the identification of the group takes place mainly with an instrumental or emotional leader, as a great number of identity attributes are ascribed to him/her. A self-perceptual questionnaire helps to study a social-perceptual mechanism of identification process deployment in leadership. The experimental results show that the formation of leadership qualities in students is necessary to consider the features of role differentiation in a group: the instrumental leader organizes a student group for the solution of educational and professional problems; the emotional leader takes care of favorable psychological climate maintenance in a group, strengthens the group cohesion.